Capturing a Hard-Wired Variability: What Makes Some Identical Twins Noticeably Different? – “The current study finds that only one allele is expressed in between 12 and 24 percent of all such pairs encoded by the mouse genome. Further, the selection of expressed alleles varies randomly from cell to cell, and switches frequently between the two options throughout their lives…. ‘We find that for those genes that are not imprinted, roughly one in five alleles is randomly and dynamically expressed only one at a time,’ says Sandberg. ‘And if one allele is being expressed, the other doesn’t know about it. There’s no coordination between two.'”

A Living Time Capsule Shows the Human Mark on Evolution – “Scientists have revived shrimp-like animals that have been buried at the bottom of the lake for an estimated 700 years. If this estimate holds up to further testing, they are the oldest animals ever resurrected…. The oldest DNA the scientists obtained from the lake dates back to around the time the Vandals were ransacking Rome. The scientists found that one genetic strain of water fleas dominated at the time — and continued to until the late 1800s. As phosphorus [from fertilizers] flooded the lake, a previously rare strain emerged and took over.”

Evolution Hidden in Plain Sight – “One of the hallmarks of *Escherichia coli* as a species is that when there’s oxygen around, it can’t feed on a compound called citrate. But one day a flask turned cloudy with an explosion of *E. coli* that were doing just that. The change was so profound that it may mean these bacteria had evolved into a new species.”

SLC24A5 light skin pigmentation allele origin – “‘The distributions of C11 and its parental haplotypes make it most likely that these two last steps occurred between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, with the A111T mutation occurring after the split between the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians.'” – @dienekes’.

The brown man with blue eyes – “Interestingly, although the Luxembourg man was blue-eyed, he also had brown skin. He lacked the ‘European’ alleles at all three genes involved in the whitening of European skin.” – from peter frost.

Ancient hunter-gatherers had rotten teeth – “Scientists have long thought that tooth decay only became common in humans about 10,000 years ago, when we began farming – and eating starchy crops that fed sugar-loving bacteria on our teeth. But Isabelle De Groote of the Natural History Museum in London, UK, and her colleagues have found widespread tooth decay in hunter-gatherers that lived several thousand years before the origin of agriculture.”

Is the dark side of parenting genetic? – “In a novel finding, Robert Plomin and colleagues suggest that negative aspects of parenting are more heritable than positive aspects. They call this The Dark Side of parenting. The effect is interesting and subtle: it suggests that whilst parents are generally consistent in their handling of their children, some genetically driven characteristics of their children lead them into more negative parenting styles…. In simple terms, even peaceable parents get irritable with difficult children.” – from dr. james thompson.

Changelings, Infanticide and Northwest European Guilt Culture – “To summarize, the changeling lore provides evidence of a NWE guilt culture dating back at least to medieval times, and the practice and attitude towards exposure suggests that ancient Greece had an emerging guilt culture as early as the 400s BC which enabled a similar individualism and intellectual development that we’ve seen in the NWE in recent centuries.” – from staffan.

bonus bonus bonus: Mysterious Microscopic Bubbles Baffle Ocean Scientists – “The most abundant photosynthetic organism in the world [cyanobacteria] sheds countless little sacs into the oceans, which could be having a dramatic impact on marine ecosystems, according to a new study. These microbial buds contain proteins and genetic material, which may influence the growth of other marine microbes and even protect them against viruses.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Dogs Relieve Themselves In-Line With Earth’s Magnetic Field – “Dogs are quite particular about where they choose to relieve themselves — not only do they defecate in direction with the north-south axis, but they also are sensitive to slight changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: War Elephant Myths Debunked by DNA – “Until now, the main question remained: Did Ptolemy employ African savanna elephants (*Loxodonta africana*) or African forest elephants (*Loxodonta cyclotis*) in the Battle or Raphia? ‘Using three different markers, we established that the Eritrean elephants are actually savanna elephants….'”